Currently I use RPi 4. I plug it into the USB-C port on my iPad and it's picked up by iOS as an Ethernet gadget. The RPi acts as a router and has a static IP address over USB. So all I have to do is use a VMC app to connect to it. It's as simple as plugging in one cable and starting one app.
I want to stick with RPi architecture because I want it to be really flexible for people to use any of the Raspberry Pi compatible distributions on it.
The SD cards are mostly for video production. I want to have a one button clear SD card feature, where I can insert an SD card, press one physical button, and a script would copy all of the files from an SD card to the destination directory on the main SSD storage drive, and then empty the card. There would be an LED light to indicate progress.
Maybe I am making something only I would really care about here. Thank you for the feedback.